So the night before and I open a bottle of Blair Pethel’s Domaine Dublère 2007 Beaune 1er Blanche Fleurs and watched James Bond on TV! The wine is really on-song, even the domestic management is appreciative – though I think a lot of the depth of flavour seems barrel-related (creamy vanilla dimensions), it has great texture, is slightly plush and generally shows lovely balance.

Okay, that was yesterday – now I’m in Beaune, and just in time.

Typically it started raining at home 3 minutes before I wanted to pack things into the car (…) most of the trip to Burgundy was dry though. Arriving to the car-park at the hotel it started with a little light rain. Five minutes after I got to the domaine, the heavens opened – big rain, glad I’m not picking!

Fortunately today’s grapes had been picked before the wet. We started triage of Volnay 1er Lurets, and really good these grapes were; full speed on the triage table and virtually zero rot – they tasted good too. The Lurets is part of a new contract together with Volnay Caillerets, but the usual give and take means that to take these 1ers, there’s also some villages Volnay to be taken too. We had been prepared for bad grapes but apart from a little rot and some underipe bunches to be triaged – I saw much worse grapes in 2006 – we still had the table running at about 90% of maximum speed !

This afternoon it was only be a delivery of Bourgogne Blanc must so no triage. If the rain abates, tomorrow will be busy though.

Info on whites seems to be all related to the storm on the Sunday 12th September. Two days before the storm the home team’s Meursault looked fantastic – the vigneron had done a great job, leaving neatly spaced bunches – everything was set. Whether they were hit by hail or not (hail was restricted to the Santenay/Chassagne border), many vines seemed to react to that weather; Those plots with the most advanced maturity were suddenly beset by botrytis – 20% of the previously beautiful Meursault was affected 1 week later. There were many stories in the last days of winemakers harvesting because their grapes were ‘turning brown’ or ‘turning to chocolate’ – that was the botrytis. Those plots with a lower level of ripeness (at the storm) seem to have followed a normal maturity path and largely failed to develop botrytis! Apparently everyone was harvesting Montrachet yesterday – the last minute before today’s rain.

Having done a good job of triage the home team were rewarded with cheese and tomato tart, duck a l’orange, cheese and finally apple tart tartin. A 2007 Montagny 1er blanc from Christophe Denizot and a 99 Fourrier Gevrey VV helped to wash it down. So effective was this lunch that there were parts of blue sky to be seen by 1:30, in fact the sun shone on-and-off all afternoon, more importantly it stayed dry. Parts of the Côtes had as much as 30mm in the morning!

Tomorrow more on the Côte de Beaune, Côte de Nuits divide…

Okay – the first full report will be tomorrow as I interrogate my fellow harvesters and stageurs – but it looks like I will be doing it wearing several layers of (waterproof!) clothing.

The forecast for my weekend – how about yours(?)

Plenty of producers in the Côte de Beaune have started to harvest their first parcels today. Fewer in the Côte de Nuits have ventured out, most of those look like they have another 3 or 4 days left to sharpen their secateurs.

My timing to join the home team looks not too bad – shame that the long-term forecast means rain might great me on Friday – that said, the long-range forecast has been wrong all year! On a positive note I feel sure that lots of producers will point to the fact that they need light as much as heat to ripen their grapes – in that respect the last days and those to come look like they might help them to generate some positive ‘spin’!

Things are very busy at Vincent Girardin’s base in Meursault; not only are they about to start harvesting, they’ve also bought a new domaine.

First the harvesting; it’s starting for Vincent Girardin with some chardonnay in the Côte de Beaune, some others are already brining in the first grapes. The storm on Sunday that delivered hail to northern Santenay and parts of Chassagne (‘just’ Morgeot mainly) mainly left a lot of fruit needing to picked sooner rather than later. The rest of the domaine’s vines will be harvested between next week and the end of the month.

Another grower confirms this, telling me:

There’s rot and it’s ok with the cold weather but there’s great heterogeneity. Anyway in general everyone is planning to pick earlier than they had first expected so harvest will probably be over by Oct 1st

Let’s see…

Now back to the enlarged Domaine Vincent Girardin – actually the new part is still a separate entity because it’s in Beaujolais – but there are 20 new hectares of vines from the estate La Tour du Bief in Chénas:

All parcels of the twenty hectares of the estate La Tour du Bief are in the village of Chénas with “lieux-dits” Les Caves, La Rochelle, Les Vérillats, Le Bief and La Tour du Bief.
A rigorous, impeccable farming plan allowed us to find an exceptional genetic reserve, with some of the vines being more than 80 years old. What more can be expected when the ambition is to restore life to this estate by producing exceptional wines?
Today, my goal is to continue the tradition of the production of great Moulin-à-Vent wines that, in the last century, competed with the great villages of the Côte de Nuits. With their structure and complexity linked to a potentially important capacity for ageing, wines from Moulin-à-Vent were always cited as examples and with age, it’s said that they “Pinotent”, meaning getting closer to their Burgundian (Pinot) neighbors by evoking aromas of cherry, matured fruits, spices and truffle.
A project of classification of the best soils as “Premier Crus” as in Burgundy is about to be studied to return this great wine to nobility. The parcels of the estate will be affected by this classification.
Winemaking is traditional, followed by ageing partly in wood foudres of 50hl and then in Burgundian barrels of 228 liters. Wines are neither fined nor filtered in order to give them as much complexity and life as is natural.
(Vincent’s press release.)